This article is adapted from Joe Concha's video commentary.
Even CNN has run out of ways to defend Joe Biden, but to defend the president at this point would be like defending a football team down 35-0 early in the second quarter.
The biggest issue facing the nation by a country mile, inflation, is at its highest since E.T. was in theaters. Gas prices are at an all-time high. It cost me $80 to fill up my little 16-year-old car today.
Skyrocketing, brazen crime forcing mass exoduses out of cities from New York to Los Angeles. And a border that is anything but secure, with fentanyl coming into this country and killing a record number of Americans, many of them younger adults.
So there clearly isn't enough red lipstick for this pig.
And now it is being leaked out of CNN that new president Chris Licht wants the network to return to the days when real journalists like Bernard Shaw were the face of the brand.
They may have been left-of-center then, but it wasn't blatant to the point like we saw during the Jeff Zucker-era, when the network might as well have been called AOCNN.
So these folks who are suddenly semi-tough on Team Biden are doing this partly because you can't defend the indefensible... and for their own self-preservation with a new boss in town.
CNN SUFFERS SMALLEST WEEKDAY AUDIENCE SINCE 2015
At least until Donald Trump declares he's running for president again, which many close to him believe he will. You don't hold rally after rally since Biden became president just for the hell of it, after all.
Either way, things have to change fast.
CNN's highest-rated show usually finishes 35th or in the cable news race. Reruns of Gunsmoke, a Western show that debuted in 1952, easily beat CNN in primetime.
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There's nowhere to go but up.
CNN needs the credibility it once had back, that's for certain, and the way to do that is to go back towards the center. The question now is: Can it do that with the current crop of talent it has?
Mostly, no.